'Lone Survivor' movie hits home with two families with Bay Area ties

Donna Axelson was watering flowers in the front yard of her Cupertino home one summer day when she noticed two men dressed in Navy blues walking up the front path to her house. "So I went over to them and said, 'Hi! My son's in the Navy,' " she recalls. "And they said, 'Yes, we know.' "

Far from the garden path of his home, Navy SEAL Matthew Axelson had dropped from a helicopter by rope into the mountains of eastern Afghanistan a day earlier. By the time it was over, June 28, 2005, would become the single worst day for Naval Special Warfare forces since D-Day. The horror and the heroism of that day will be recounted in the film version of a book by the one SEAL who made it out alive, Marcus Luttrell's "Lone Survivor," which opens Friday.

Matthew Axelson, left, of Cupertino and James Suh were Navy Seals who were killed in Afghanistan.
(Courtesy of Donna Axelson)

As America's military presence in Afghanistan continues to diminish, and remote mountain outposts are ceded back to tribal elders -- some of them Taliban supporters -- who have controlled the region for centuries, the film serves as a grim reminder that every casualty of war is a story, not a statistic. "One of the good things about this film," says Chris Bown, whose brother-in-law was among the SEALs who perished, "is it reminds people there are guys over there, still fighting, still dying."

Matthew Axelson and three other members of a Navy SEAL reconnaissance team were the tip of a U.S. military spear aimed at the heart of Taliban militia activities in the vast mountain range along Afghanistan's border with Pakistan. The operation, dubbed "Red Wings," quickly descended into catastrophe.

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The four Navy SEALs on the ground -- including Axelson -- went missing after a furious firefight, during which they were encircled by heavily armed Taliban. Another eight SEALs -- including one of Axelson's good friends, James Suh -- and eight Army aviators died in a rescue attempt when their lightly-armored Chinook transport helicopter was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade as it hovered over the battle.

Donna Axelson and her husband, Cordell, visited the film's set during production and met actor Ben Foster, who plays their son. Despite writer-director Peter Berg's warning that the picture would be "graphic," they have seen an advance screening.

The most difficult moment, Donna says, came at the end, when images of the real men who fought and died that day appear on the screen, including video footage of Matthew Axelson's wedding. "That was hard," Donna says, sobbing.

All 19 American families who lost loved ones in the Red Wings tragedy received notification visits on the same day, June 29, 2005. That included Solomon Suh, a single dad who raised his son James, then moved with him to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, where James was stationed after joining the SEALs, the Navy's elite commando force that was responsible for the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden.

Solomon Suh had heard about the chopper crash, but he remained confident his son was safe. Then he saw three officers in naval whites walking toward his door, and he sank slowly to his knees. In Benicia, James' older sister, Claudia Suh Bown, was on her way to work when she heard a news report about the crash of a special operations helicopter in Afghanistan, but she convinced herself it didn't involve her brother.

Suh's sister remains so grief-stricken she was unable to see the movie; after taking part in annual barbecues with SEAL families the first few years after James died, she had to bow out of those, too. "It made her miss James more being around the guys and not having him there," says her husband, Chris. The couple named their now 4-year-old son Matthew James Bown, after the two warriors and close friends.

Donna and Cordell Axelson were the driving force behind a memorial erected in Cupertino's Memorial Park in 2007, an effort she describes as "therapeutic." The statue depicts Matthew -- who attended Monta Vista High School -- and James in commando gear, rifles ready. Solomon Suh, who moved in with his daughter's family after his son's death, used to drive down from Benicia on Sundays and spend the day with the bronze likeness of his son, who was 28 when he died, occasionally reading to him from the Bible.

When word came on July 4, 2005, that the bodies of fellow SEALs Danny Dietz and Mike Murphy had been recovered, but that her son was still missing, Donna Axelson leaned on her strong religious faith to remain hopeful. "I believed that he was OK, and when he was found, and he was dead, I realized that I'd had that peace because he was in heaven with our Lord," she says.

According to Luttrell's account -- dramatized in vivid, often bloody, detail in the movie -- in the early hours of the operation, he, Axelson, Dietz and Murphy were still waiting for daylight when three goat herders stumbled upon their location. Even though the Americans had reason to believe Afghans in that Taliban-controlled region were unfriendly, the SEALs let them leave. It took only an hour for them to be surrounded by a formidable fighting force.

Dietz was shot multiple times, but kept returning fire until he died. Murphy knowingly sacrificed his own life to save the men under his command, going to a spot with no surrounding cover to use the team's satellite phone to call Bagram Air Base for reinforcements, after which Luttrell saw his best friend spun around by several rounds entering his body. Murphy was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, the U.S. military's highest decoration.

Axelson's body was eventually found a mile from his comrades, and based on the number of ammunition magazines he carried, the after-action report by the Navy suggests he kept fighting after being wounded multiple times. He was 29.

"They believe the Taliban tracked Matthew," his mother says, "and that he fought until he was out of bullets."

Murphy's call for air support launched a quick-response team of heavily armored Army attack helicopters, and the Chinook troop carrier, which usually operates only under cover of darkness. When Dietz and Axelson were posthumously awarded the Navy Cross more than a year later, the pilot who was with them at the mission's beginning told Axelson's parents and his widow, Cindy, who were part of the gathering at the U.S. Navy Memorial, "I can't tell you how much I wish I could have been there for him."

Both Axelson and Suh believed in the work they were doing. "Matthew died doing what he wanted to be doing," says his mom, "fighting for his country. I mean, gosh, don't you want to die doing something you love to do, rather than from some horrendous disease, or in a car accident?"

Luttrell has said publicly that he imagines the families of the fallen resent him for being the only one to make it out alive, and he struggles with survivor's guilt. "Every time we see him, we try to remind Marcus how grateful we are that he survived, and that he had the courage to tell the story," Donna Axelson says. "If he hadn't survived, these guys would have been statistics on the evening news."